A brutal murder which has police baffled; a series of emails hailing it ‘the perfect crime’ and an anonymous tip-off to the police – ingredients for an intriguing crime novel perhaps? But this is reality becoming fiction – and then back to reality again…

Polish ‘crime writer’ Krystian Bala was jailed for 25 years this week after police discovered that his ‘fictional’ novel Amok was actually a grisly account of the murder of his estranged wife’s lover. The murderer-turned-author told authorities he had based his book on press reports and the rest was fiction – but the book was in fact a graphic re-telling of the crime complete with all the intimate details which could only have been known by the police – or the killer! And with true psychotic vanity, Bala had also injected his own characteristics into the book’s narrator – sharing psychological characteristics and life experiences.

At the time of his arrest, a shocked and outraged Bala told supporters that the police ‘were treating the book as if it was a literal autobiography rather than a piece of fiction’. Perhaps the ‘autobiography’ now needs a new chapter – because in the book, the murderer got away with it!